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When William Styron’s sweeping novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” was published in 1967, it caused two, divergent developments.
It won for Styron the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but it also became the source of serious concerns among the nation’s black intellectuals.
Nat Turner had been the leader of a brutal slave-uprising in the 1830’s. His written confession (though some historians question its authenticity) was the framework for Styron’s fictional work.
While a few highly-respected African-American authors, like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, rallied to Styron’s defense, his detractors made their feelings known in the book “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.”
Styron must have taken those strong criticisms to heart. After all, his “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” had, as with several of his works, been flecked with parts of his own biography.
His father, William Styron, Sr., had been the descendants of slave owners. The real-life Nat Turner had staged his rebellion about 50 miles from Styron’s hometown of Newport News, Virginia.
His mother, though, the former Pauline Abraham, had grown up just beyond the grasp of where slave-holding was legal, in Uniontown.
Yet, he’d apparently inherited his strongest liberal sensibilities from his father, not his mother.
In James L. West’s biography about Styron (William Styron, A Life), he wrote, “Prejudice against the laboring classes in Uniontown also had racial overtones. The strikebreakers, or scabs, were mostly southern Negroes, brought north by management and protected by the thuggish Coal and Iron Police, who were recruited and armed by mine owners.”
Those feelings became evident to Styron during his numerous visits to Uniontown, when there would be heated discussions at the dinner tables of his mother’s relatives.
These weren’t always short stopovers, either.
“William Styron, of Newport News, Va., is visiting his aunt, Mrs. Arthur E. Crow, of Old Oaks, Hopwood,” said an item in the July 8, 1939 edition of the Uniontown Daily News Standard.
The 13 year-old Styron was visiting Fayette County, after his mother, who had lost her 12 year battle with cancer, died and was buried in Uniontown.
“Upon arrival here, the body will be taken to the Ferguson Funeral Home on Morgantown Street, where respects can be paid by friends from noon until 3 p.m. tomorrow,” said her death notice in the July 22, 1939 edition of the Uniontown Morning Herald.
On Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1939, the News Standard reported that, Mrs. A.E. Crow of Old Oaks, Hopwood, has accompanied her nephew, William Styron, who has been vacationing with her since June…”
Styron would continue to visit Uniontown, and later make a mention of it in a letter to his father.
When he was planning to marry his wife Rose, Styron wrote a letter to his father from Rome, Italy on April 8th, 1953.
He wanted to give his future-bride a special piece of jewelry.
“I wonder if it would be possible for you to prevail upon Aunt Edith to send me, by registered air express, that fine engagement ring which, I gather, reposes in some safe-deposit box up in Uniontown. I remember your having often mentioned this to me, and you know of course, that I would be greatly honored to be able to give it to Rose,” he wrote.
But I’ve also discovered that one of Styron’s published works has much to do with Fayette County.
The 1993 book of three short stories, “A Tidewater Morning,” is a semi-autobiographical look at three stages of Styron’s early life.
The third story, which is also titled “A Tidewater Morning,” is set when he’s 13聽— the year his mother died.
Oh, he substitutes the name Paul Whitehurst, for his own, and he uses his aunt’s name聽— Adelaide聽— instead of his mother’s name, Pauline.
He writes about his mother’s exposure to the great composers of the day. (Something the future Mrs. William Styron, Sr. may have encountered when she studied in Vienna, Austria as a young lady)
In Styron’s short story, she collected hand-inscribed pictures on her visits abroad. “One picture with no inscription save the place and year-Vienna, 1904-always held my gaze, since it showed my young mother herself in a garland of brown braids,” Styron wrote.
“F眉r Adelaide, read one, above chicken scratches in German, signed Gustav Mahler,” he also wrote.
He also laments the fact that his Yankee mother had, for a long time, shown little respect for their servants, but that she’d finally grown a grudging respect for theirs聽— a woman named Florence.
At one point, Styron’s (Whitehurst’s) father remarks, “I fully concede that your attitudes have changed remarkably in recent years. You have become, if by my standards, not quite truly open-minded, then certainly tolerant, and your sense of fair play is exemplary.”
There is another passage, in which Styron writes about his mother’s feelings about their black servant Florence. He happens to substitute the town “Uniontown” for another one.
“It’s not her color, it’s her class! She’s a servant! She’s of the servant class, the class that served our family in CONNELLSVILLE (my emphasis), some Irish, some German, some Hungarian, but servants!”
The Pulitzer Prize caliber clarity of his narrative is unmistakable.
He’s writing with Uniontown in mind!